Instagram is developing a track record for coming up with app names that aren't original.

Tuesday, the company unveiled Hyperlapse, which lets users take video and play it back up to 12 times faster. The app has caused concern for developer Jeroen van den Belt, who released his app called Hyperlapse a year ago.

"I'm just a small independent developer, and now this big company Instagram uses the same name, I ask myself if that is allowed," said van den Belt, who lives in Germany.

Van den Belt's app is not trademarked. His 99-cent app, available in the Apple App Store, lets users pick starting and ending points on a map and then compiles a street view video of the journey.

He came up with the name "hyperlapse" after stumbling on a Wikipedia page on the term, which the online encyclopedia describes as "an exposure technique in time-lapse photography, in which the position of the camera is being changed between each exposure in order to create a tracking shot in time-lapse sequences." He felt it fit his app perfectly, and looked to see whether anyone had used the term in the app store.

"Its a cool name. No one is using it," van den Belt said. "I will take it."

Van den Belt said his app has had 50,000 downloads since it was released last year. With the release of Instagram's app of the same name, more people are downloading van den Belt's, and he said many users confused.

Instagram said it hadn't received any complaints about its app's name, but van den Belt told The Chronicle that he plans to call Instagram. He said he is surprised that Instagram never contacted him before releasing its app.

"Hyperlapse is actually an industry term," an Instagram spokesman said in an e-mail.

Instagram's Hyperlapse app can be used on the iPhone 4 and up, iPad and fifth-generation iPod Touch devices, Instagram said on its website.

The company came under criticism this summer when it released an app called Bolt in Singapore, South Africa and New Zealand. That's because a San Francisco startup called Bolt said it already had an app by the same name.